Be Intellectually Honest, but F*ck a Hater

Building a new audience is an interesting business. The Transfer Flow turned one over the weekend, and now has about 20,000 subscribers on the newsletter, currently growing at 3-5k a month. While probably half of our readers are ones that have known Kim or myself since times of yore, at least half of you are new to our work. And that doesn’t include the hordes of YouTube children who watch the podcast every week and call PVS “daddy.” (For those who care, podcast total listens between YouTube and audio are now in the 10-12k downloads per episode range — it turns out Patrick has A LOT of children.)

A legit 500-1000 of you work for professional football teams, and some of you forward this newsletter around the office on a daily basis. Which is annoying for our subscriber count, but 🥰 for signing up with your team email address.

I mentioned the new follower + lack of history phenomenon on social media, suggesting we might need a Greatest Hits episode or three of the podcast, to catch people up on our lore…

…and received some gentle push back for my lack of modesty from a journalist I like, and suggestions that we also include greatest misses in the podcast episodes.

First off, I love the idea of greatest misses and have been publicly discussing various ones of my own since 2014. For reference:

Predicting transfer success is hard, almost regardless of the criteria. Humans are complicated. How they will fit in at different teams, with different coaches and tactics is complicated. Whether their performances will justify their price, their wages, and the opportunity cost is complicated.

Sometimes I have had horrible misses, but the vast majority of what I (and we) have written in the past has been more accurate than pretty much everyone else in the space. We’ve historically been miles better than most people getting paid to do the work in the team space, and that’s a high bar because there are some smart, knowledgeable people in those jobs. (And uh… some less smart, less knowledgeable people too.) Meanwhile, most people who do what we do in public are so bad at it that they haven’t even bothered making predictions — they just report what happened and hand wave it through. Here we go (again)! Good job, good effort.

There’s also a culture among certain people online (and especially English journalists) where they suggest stating basic information and achievements can be immodest. This is despite the fact that the entirety of the online social media ecosystem is basically a teardown space.

Putting a noteworthy CV in public isn’t arrogance, it’s necessary. Stating what you have done in the industry is table stakes for starting a new business and garnering new attention. In order to be noticed at all, you have to show your credentials to an audience and tell them why they should bother to pay attention to your work…. Including all those YouTube kids who call Patrick “daddy,” and demand to know why you keep being mean to/making fun of Manchester United when the kids just ran across your channel last week.

There’s history there, my younglings…

Then there are the people who weren’t around or conveniently forgot what happened at various points of football since 2013, and insist on telling you otherwise.

Example: Earlier this week, I said something nice about Chelsea’s transfer targets so far this summer, and got a reply that they were bound to get it right eventually. My counterpoint was that people had been saying that about United for a decade, and it still hadn’t happened yet, so that’s not necessarily true. (And people used to say it about Everton, but then stopped.)

Reply that I have received many times over the years: I don’t believe anyone ever really said that about Everton.

And that is why it’s fun to have receipts!

Back in 2017, I wrote an analysis of the £45m Gylfi Sigurdsson to Everton deal.

You might not remember any of this because Gylfi disappeared from the public eye and media coverage in 2021 for reasons that literally cannot be discussed in this newsletter without threat of lawsuit, but the feeling when I published was that fans were delighted that they signed the player, Sigurdsson was a good signing, and Everton was in great financial shape.

Information you may not be aware of: Teams are A LOT smarter now than they used to be.

I can prove this to you by stating one tiny little insane fact that people were happy to overlook back then:

GYLFI WAS 28 AT THE TIME.

Everton paid a club record fee for a 28-year-old midfielder who was already losing his legs, and whose primary value was set piece delivery. And they did it in a window when Pascal Groß went to Brighton for £4M.

This was an update from one year later on an Everton fan blog.

Fast forward to recent years, and Everton were in huge financial trouble, partly caused by ownership/oligarch issues, and partly because their overpriced signings were so frequent and so bad.

The same was true of Manchester United. They were the richest club in the world, and fans and media swore the magic money tree would never stop delivering stacks of cash for their new signings. But ownership’s uh… “payments of debt” and a monster wage bill full of stupidly overpaid players eventually came home to roost, and the product on the field suffered.

Is suffering.

Will continue to suffer.

Most of the times I was massively wrong about a player triggered changes in how I evaluated them for potential transfers. The Suarez fuckup shifted me to embrace expected goals and assists. Other ones caused us to collect new data at StatsBomb (the company I founded in 2017 and sold last year) and occasionally improve the data spec and quality in ways no one else in football matched.

We innovated because we wanted to be more right, all of the time.

And THAT mantra was the result of spending my adult formative years at the forge of professional sports betting. There is nothing in this life that produces a higher level of intellectual honesty than prediction markets and professional gambling (I include the stock market here). Every time you caveat being opinionated and wrong, you get to test that theory over and over again, and either eventually admit you were an idiot or it costs you a massive amount of money. (See also: beatings + morale poster above.)

I discussed losing as a gambler back in on October, when I was getting punched in the face by the results.

-Were we wrong?
-WHY were we wrong?
-How can we get better?

My gambling results ended up very positive for the season, despite the early losses. But being honest about whether it was bad luck or bad analysis is a crucial component in gambling and analysing teams and transfers.

Your ego gets in the way at the peril of your bankroll and your reputation.

To circle back, stating your track record isn’t arrogance or immodesty, it’s literally just facts and process. We are good at what we do here at The Transfer Flow. We get some things wrong, but we get A LOT of things right, and we are always trying to get better.

School doesn’t teach you how to fail. No one tells you that failing is totally normal when trying to do new or hard things, and you should embrace it as long as you are learning the lessons provided. Make a lot of predictions, and you are guaranteed to get some of those wrong. But did you learn from them? And can you teach other people about what you learned?

Here’s another fun secret about life: No one outside your immediate family and friends will really celebrate your wins - you have to do that for yourself.

People on the internet will tell you a ton of reasons why you aren’t qualified, and then when you prove them wrong or show you ARE qualified, they will move the goalposts on you to still try and be right. My friend Kyle at Driveline Baseball has seen this happen regularly in a parallel career. Brentford’s owner Matthew Benham saw this happen in the media almost constantly until the Bees were promoted.

• I rebuilt the entire product suite for one of the world’s largest sports betting companies (with help!) in my 30’s and changed how the whole world bet on sports.

• I won a Danish Superliga title (with help!).

• I taught more than half the Premier League and hundreds of coaches around the world how to coach and analyse set pieces.

• I started a data company from scratch, created the world’s best event and tracking data in two sports (with help!), and sold it for a life-changing amount of money.

• At the time I sold it, over 300 professional football teams used StatsBomb data and tools to find better transfers.

• I kinda, sorta literally changed how the world visualises sports data. I’m not even sorry that (almost) all the quants hate it.

• And I regularly got a lot more transfer predictions right than wrong on the internet, including their prices.

Those are facts.

They are also marketing, and give people reasons to understand why our content is different and possibly better than the other slop on the internet.

Celebrate your wins, kids, and fuck anyone who wants to tell you otherwise.

—TK

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